Docker hits 1.0 release milestone

Container project Docker, which officially reached 1.0 GA
status this week, was first cast into the open source seas by PaaS
providers Dotcloud 15 months ago. Since then, it’s become one of
the fastest growing open source projects in the space, accumulating
8,741 commits from more than 460 contributors, clocking up 2.75
million downloads, and spawning 14,000 “Dockerized” apps to
date.

Starting life as a solitary container on a
laptop, there are now thousands of Docker containers in the cloud.
In part, this is down to the general movement towards highly
scalable architectures and an
app-orientated culture. As a
lightweight open-source technology, Docker is perfectly
poised to capitalise on demand from devs to looking for a speedy
way to port their code into the cloud.

With Docker 1.0, the Docker
blog states that the “1.0” label signifies a level
of quality, feature completeness, backward compatibility and API
stability to meet enterprise IT standards.” Moreover, to ensure
there’s a complete solution for using Docker in production, the
team are also delivering full documentation, training programs,
professional services, and enterprise support.

With 1.0 now ready to ship, the project team
would like to see Docker established as an open platform, composed
of the Docker engine, the container runtime and packaging tools, as
well as the cloud-based collaboration platform Docker
hub.

New additions to this release include a
new instruction, COPY, which copies files and folders as-is from
the build context, as well as improvements around the ADD
instruction and volumes to retain ownership and permissions of
files during the build of images.

In addition, on the Sysadmins side, the Docker Engine now
has the ability to pause and unpause running containers, meaning
users can reclaim CPU cycles that a container is using for better
resource scheduling on the system. There have also been some fixes
and tweaks to existing features – you can take a look at the
complete list
here.